SOURCE: "Modernism and Romanticism," in The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction, Macmillan Press, 1979, pp. 179-99.

In the following excerpt, Josipovici studies the relationship between Modernism and the earlier artistic movement of Romanticism.

[The] years between 1885 and 1914 saw the birth of the modern movement in the arts. What are the specific features of that movement and how are we to account for its emergence?

Two points need to be made before we start. First of all we must be clear that in one sense our inquiry is absurd. There is no physical entity called 'modernism' which we can extract from the variety of individual works of art and hold up for inspection. Every modern artist of any worth has achieved what he has precisely because he has found his own individual voice and because this voice is distinct from those around him. Yet it cannot...